Manual tasks

Now you can have a manually scheduled task placed anywhere in your plan, and Project Plan won't change it. This new improvement​ gives you greater compatibility with all plans created in Microsoft Project. ​​

Manual tasks are tasks with task mode manually scheduled. They should be used when you want to explicitly set a task's start and finish dates and not allow it to be changed automatically by the scheduler based on changes to other tasks.

When a task is in manually scheduled mode, the Start, Finish, and Duration columns can be blank or include text values in addition to recognizable dates.​

Manual tasks and interaction​ with other scheduling fields:

Duration, Start and Finish date can be text, number or dates -this values not used in scheduling process.

Constraints - can be used but this value will be ignored

Resources - can be assigned to tasks, these values are not used in the scheduling process.

Dependencies ​-can be used but this value will be ignored

Project and resource calendars - will be ignored

Task Mode​

The Task Mode field indicates whether a task is scheduled manually or automatically, which gives you the option of deciding how much control you want over task scheduling in a project. By default, tasks are set as auto​ scheduled, with a start date, finish date, and duration calculated based on inserted fields values.

The Task Mode field is not included by default. Use the Insert Column option to insert and ​display the Task Mode column in views like Gantt Chart, Tracking Gantt or Task Sheet view.

To change the task mode, click in the field. In the list that appears, click Manually Scheduled or Auto Scheduled. You can also select specific tasks, then on the Task Information General tab, in the Schedule Mode group, select Manually Scheduled or Auto Scheduled.

Before starting your plan, if you want to specify in your plan that all tasks are Manually Scheduled, set Manually Scheduled mode from Options dialog → Schedule tab. In this way, all the newly inserted tasks will be in Manually Scheduled mode.